HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII 
fore noon. We passed a pleasant forenoon strolling 
along the tree-fringed brink, looking down eight or 
nine hundred feet upon its black lava floor, and 
plucking ohelo berries, which grew there abund- 
antly, a kind of large, red huckleberry that one could 
eat out of hand, but that one could not get excited 
over. They were better in a pie than in the hand. 
Their name seemed to go well with the suggestion of 
the scenes amid which they grew. Kilaueais a round 
extinct crater about three miles across and seven 
or eight hundred feet deep. It has been the scene 
of terrific explosions in past ages, but it has now 
dwindled to the small active crater of Halemaumau, 
which is sunk near the middle of it like a huge pot, 
two hundred or more feet deep and a thousand feet 
across. 
In the mid-afternoon a party of eight or ten of us 
on horseback set out to visit the volcano. The trail 
led down the broken and shelving side of the crater, 
amid trees and bushes, till it struck the floor of lava 
at the bottom. In going down I was aware all the 
time of a beautiful bird-song off on my left, a song 
almost as sweet as that of our hermit thrush, but of 
an entirely different order. I think it was the song 
of one of the honey-suckers, a red bird with black 
wings that in flight looked like our scarlet tanager. 
Our course took us out over the cracked and con- 
torted lava-beds, where no green thing was growing. 
The forms of the lava-flow suggested mailed and 
151 
